The institutionalization of concert life also had its negative aspect, in that audiences gradually became more conservative in their musical tastes. The old aristocratic system had actually been more neutral in this respect. While many aristocratic patrons cared less about music than display, and some exercised the most whimsical of tastes, others actually encouraged composers to pursue new paths, or at least left them alone to do so. On the other hand, the concert public tended to conservatism. The mainly middle-class buyers of concert tickets naturally wanted value, as with anything else they bought. What counted as value was something already established as a masterpiece, something that they already knew and liked.

Composers with an interest in innovation — and that includes every composer discussed in this unit — often felt that their work was being neglected by the concert world. A paradoxical situation developed. The composers’ dependence on the public was tinged with resentment, and the public’s admiration for composers — never before higher — was tinged with distrust, even hostility.

In this climate the composer Robert Schumann started an important magazine to campaign for Romantic music in the face of public indifference to serious art and preference for what he regarded as flashy trivia. Editor Schumann invented a “League of David” to slay the “Goliath” of the concert audience. (In the Bible, Goliath was the champion of the Philistines; it was around this time that the adjective philistine came to mean “uncultured.”) Later, the music of Liszt and Wagner was attacked by hostile critics as formless, dissonant, and overemotional. Later still, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler were repeatedly rejected by audiences in Vienna, in spite of Mahler’s important position as head of the Opera there.

The gap between innovative music and a conservative concert public, which opened up in the nineteenth century, widened in the twentieth, as we shall see. Here as elsewhere, the nineteenth century set the tone for modern musical life.